Tag Archives: Catholicism

Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.

Where is that Law for which we broke our own,
Where now that Justice for which Flesh resigned
Her hereditary right to passion, Mind
His will to absolute power? Gone. Gone.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own?

The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss,

We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Thanks to my friend Matt Sitman for bringing this one to my attention. If you don’t read Matthew’s work on Commonweal magazine, I recommend you do. You can start with his newest piece, “Sex and the Synod”, about the church’s posture toward the sexual revolution. I especially liked this:

The task of genuine Christian discernment in these matters is to sift through the gains and losses of the sexual revolution rather than dismiss it in one swoop and reply only with a steadfast no. Christians, and the church, must be able to distinguish between learning from history and experience and simply being fashionable. There really is a difference…

In his opening homily at the Synod on Monday, Pope Francis spoke of a “Church that journeys together to read reality with the eyes of faith and with the heart of God.” That posture of critical openness, of believing the realities we experience might actually teach us something, finds its negation in Reno’s no. It all reminds me of a line from a favorite novel of mine, found in a letter written by an aging minister to his son: “Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.”

It echoes Updike’s liberating response about his belief, pulled from this interview:

Questioner: I remember reading that you said that other belief systems were religions of No, and you chose a religion of Yes.

John Updike: Yes, I did. And that terminology I got from Karl Barth, who I found of the twentieth century theologians to be the most comforting as well as the most uncompromising. He does dismiss all attempts to make theism naturalistic… He’s very definite that it’s Scripture and nothing else. I find this hard to swallow, but I like to see Barth’s swallowing it, and I like his tone of voice. He talks about the Yes and No of life, and says he loves Mozart more than Bach because Mozart expresses the Yes of life.

“Work is necessary, and it’s good in its place: as a means to an end, the end being to provide the necessities of life. From the time of the Greeks to the rise of industrialism that was the idea — work was a means to an end. But when work was over was the time of true human life: time for family, friends, community, for the life of the mind and the life of the spirit.

At the zenith of the Middle Ages… it was held that sloth and restlessness, ‘leisurelessness’, the incapacity to enjoy leisure, were all closely connected; sloth was held to be the source of restlessness, and the ultimate cause of ‘work for work’s sake’. It may well seem paradoxical to maintain that the restlessness at the bottom of a fanatical and suicidal activity should come from the lack of will to action…

Our culture feels in its bones that ‘hard work is good.’ Aquinas, the great medieval philosopher, propounded a contrary opinion: `The essence of virtue consists in the good rather than in the difficult. Not everything that is more difficult is necessarily more virtuous; it must be more difficult in such a way that it achieves a higher good as well as being more difficult.’

The tendency to overvalue hard work and the effort of doing something difficult is so deep-rooted that it even infects our notion of love. Why should it be that the average Christian regards loving one’s enemy as the most exalted form of love? Principally because it offers an example of a natural bent heroically curbed; the exceptional difficulty, the impossibility… of loving one’s enemy constitutes the greatness of the love. And what does Aquinas say? ‘It is not the difficulty of loving one’s enemy that matters when the essence of the merit of doing so is concerned, excepting in so far as the perfection of love wipes out the difficulty…’

The inmost significance of the exaggerated value which is set upon work appears to be this: man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless… he refuses to have anything as a gift. We have only to think for a moment how much the Christian understanding of life depends upon the existence of ‘Grace’; let us recall that the Holy Spirit of God is Himself called a ‘gift’ in a special sense; that the great teachers of Christianity say that the premise of God’s justice is his love; that everything gained and everything claimed follows upon something given, and comes after something gratuitous and unearned; that in the beginning there is always a gift—we have only to think of all this for a moment in order to see what a chasm separates the tradition of the Christian West and that other view [of classical Greece].”

“When I dance, I dance. When I sleep, I sleep; and when I am strolling alone through a beautiful orchard, although part of the time my thoughts are occupied by other things, for part of the time too I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the delight in being alone there, and to me…

To enjoy life requires some husbandry. I enjoy it twice as much as others, since the measure of our joy depends on the greater or lesser degree of our attachment to it. Above all now, when I see my span so short, I want to give it more ballast; I want to arrest the swiftness of its passing by the swiftness of my capture, compensating for the speed with which it drains away by the intensity of my enjoyment. The shorter my lease of it, the deeper and fuller I must make it.”

More and more recently, I see thinkers I admire cite Montaigne as one of those unassailable luminaries – like Augustine, Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, or Dr. Johnson – whose voice is wise enough, and work compendious enough, to cut through our frenetic cultural discourse with the weight of a primary source.

Julian Barnes calls Montaigne our philosophical link to the Ancient World. He was also the man who said “Philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir,” or “To be a philosopher is to learn how to die” – a vital reflection that is also perhaps the most misunderstood sentence in philosophy (until Marx started to talk about religion as an opiate…).

The reflection is especially essential to the excerpt above, sourced from perhaps the most seminal of Montaigne’s many celebrated essays. Montaigne had imbibed the Platonists, and thus in linking the practice of philosophy to eventual peace with mortality, was not claiming that we can learn to feel comfortable with the fact of death if we simply muse enough on the subject. Rather, as a Catholic of Jewish origins who flirted with Deism, Montaigne was merely reframing a claim made by Socrates and later Cicero: namely, that in death you are finally unfettered from your corporeal chains, so you better get your mind – or, if you prefer, your soul – in shape because that’s all you’ll have when your star finally sets. Montaigne’s quasi-Deism (which consistently reads like Fideism to me) factors into this equation in an essential way. While a convinced Catholic may take his next existence for granted, brooders like Montaigne often struggle with a concept so uniquely divorced from empirical confirmation. Cicero was one of these thinkers; as an Epicurean he doubted a life-to-come, but as a devotee of Socrates, he thought that perhaps he would outlast his mortal coil. So a convenient compromise arose in his mind. We are heading towards either transcendence or nothingness, he thought, so why fret? Neither option is bad. And you can’t decide the course anyway.

In my reading, Montaigne replaces this rigid Stoicism with a penchant for falling into spectacular daydreams about issues of life and death. Perhaps his most stunning feature is how anti-melancholic he remains despite the weight of his preoccupations, as Ciceronian coolness gives way to warm reveries about the things we humans care about but cannot know for certain. This is not to say that Montaigne had some palpably intense joie de vivre (he didn’t), rather that as a Christian humanist he felt the force of life in a powerful way – a force catalyzed by contemplation, reflection, and an ability to perceive variances of light, even in the shades and shadows of existence. He is a thinker who is continually elated by the sunlight that silhouettes clouds.

“‘To Carthage I came,’ recalled Augustine later, ‘where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. As yet I loved no one, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated need, I hated myself for not being needy. I pursued whoever—whatever might be lovable, in love with love. Safety I hated—and any course without danger. For within me was a famine.’…

When in the classical period we reach the first works to be designated as autobiographies, we can only be confounded by their impersonal tone…

Then we reach Augustine, who tells us everything–his jealousies in infancy, his thieving as a boy, his stormy relationship with his over-bearing mother (the ever-certain Monica), his years of philandering, his breakdowns, his shameful love for an unnamed peasant woman, whom he finally sends away. His self-loathing is as modern as that of a character in Camus or Beckett—and as concrete: ‘I carried inside of me a cut and a bleeding soul, and how to get rid of it I just didn’t know. I sought every pleasure–the countryside, sports, fooling around, the peace of a garden, friends and good company, sex, reading. My soul floundered in the void—and came back upon me. For where could my heart flee from my heart? Where could I escape from myself?’

No one had ever talked this way before. If we page quickly through world literature from its beginnings to the advent of Augustine, we realize that with Augustine human consciousness takes a quantum leap forward—and becomes self-consciousness. Here for the first time is a man consistently observing himself not as Man but as this singular man—Augustine. From this point on, true autobiography becomes possible, and so does its near relative, subjective and autobiographical fiction. Fiction had always been there, in the form of storytelling. But now for the first time there glimmers the possibility of psychological fiction: the subjective story, the story of a soul. Though the cry of Augustine—the Man Who Cried ‘I’—will seldom be heard again in full force until the early modern period, he is the father not only of the autobiography but of the modern novel. He is also a distinguished forebear of the modern science of psychology.”

“Over Easter in 1964 [Robert] went with Jacqueline, her sister and brother-in-law, the Radziwills, and Charles Spalding to Paul Mellon’s house in Antigua. Jacqueline, who had been seeking her own consolation, showed him Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way. ‘I’d read it quite a lot before and I brought it with me. So I gave it to him and I remember he’d disappear. He’d be in his room an awful lot of the time… reading that and underlining things.’…

Robert Kennedy’s underlinings suggest themes that spoke to his anguish. He understood with Aeschylus ‘the antagonism at the heart of the world,’ mankind fast bound to calamity, life a perilous adventure; but then ‘men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life…’ This was not swashbuckling defiance; rather it was the perception that the mystery of suffering underlay the knowledge of life… Robert Kennedy memorized the great lines from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus: ‘He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.’…

As John Kennedy’s sense of the Greeks was colored by his own innate joy in existence, Robert’s was directed by an abiding melancholy. He underscored a line from Herodotus: ‘Brief as life is there never yet was or will be a man who does not wish more than once to die rather than to live.’ In later years, at the end of an evening, he would sometimes quote the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles:

The long days store up many things nearer to grief than joy
… Death at the last, the deliverer.
Not to be born is past all prizing best.
Next best by far when one has seen the light.
Is to go thither swiftly whence he came.

The fact that he found primary solace in Greek impressions of character and fate did not make him less faithful a Catholic. Still, at the time of truth, Catholic writers did not give him precisely what he needed. And his tragic sense was, to use Auden’s distinction, Greek rather than Christian—the tragedy of necessity rather than the tragedy of possibility; ‘What a pity it had to be this way,’ rather than, ‘What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.'”

About the top picture: It is not an image of Robert and John together, with John walking away from his brother across the dunes. Rather, this photograph was taken in 1966. Robert was touring a photo gallery, when he came across this Mark Evans mural of his brother. While he had casually strolled past the other works, he stopped for several seconds before this one, not saying a word, then continued walking. The resulting photograph of the event was taken by Nat Fein.

I’ve written out some meandering reflections on the references and broader implications to be found in this section of Schlesinger’s book, but I’m going to publish them later this week, hopefully in combination with some other scattered thoughts about John F. Kennedy’s legacy and death.

Until then, read a section of Robert’s improvised eulogy for Martin Luther King Jr., in which he quotes the above passage from Aeschylus.

On a chilly evening in St. Peter’s Square last week, a little boy upstages Francis. He wanders up to the pope, clings to him, and stays by his side. At one point, as Francis delivers his homily, the boy climbs onto the Papal chair. Francis does not react. He does not guide the boy offstage or direct the Pontifical assistants to do so. All he does is look at the boy with the gentle amusement of an indulged grandfather.

What an uplifting image.

What a refreshing picture of a church whose recent past has been so deeply and darkly stained by such lacerating cruelty to so many of its children. Andrew Sullivan, a dedicated Catholic and vocal admirer of Francis, reacted to the above photograph in even more stark terms: “From raping children to seating them on the papal chair. Know hope.”

As Sullivan notes, moments like this happened often to Jesus. He would be addressing individuals and families, some with children or infants. I’m sure the kids were soon restless, as many of us once were in church, and they began to wander, play games, make noise. And their agitations broke the precious concentration of the adults in the audience. Some of the parents wanted Jesus to bless their children. Accounts in Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell the same story:

They brought little children to Him… and the disciples rebuked those who brought them. But when Jesus saw it, He was greatly displeased and said to them, “Let the children come to me and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”

I recently posted a selection of quotes from great scientists who likened their work to the inquisitive play of children. And maybe the essence of such admissions extends into life’s moral and spiritual spheres as well.

A relevant example. Towards the end of “De Profundis,” the extended letter he wrote while festering in solitary confinement in Reading Goal, Oscar Wilde posed a question to himself: What would he write about if he were ever set free? “Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement” was his answer, on which he elaborated by observing,

[Christ] took children as the type of what people should try to become. He held them up as examples to their elders, which I myself have always thought the chief use of children, if what is perfect should have a use. Dante describes the soul of a man as coming from the hand of God ‘weeping and laughing like a little child,’ and Christ also saw that… He would not hear of life being sacrificed to any system of thought or morals. He pointed out that forms and ceremonies were made for man, not man for forms and ceremonies…

This Wildean take on the Gospels rhymes with Francis’s, which can be further elucidated in the transcript of his first interview with La Civiltà Cattolica. It features the following moments, among others:

I ask Pope Francis point-blank: “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?” He stares at me in silence. I ask him if I may ask him this question. He nods and replies: “I ​​do not know what might be the most fitting description… I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition of who I am. It is not a figure of speech, a literary category. I am a sinner.”…

The interviewer then asks Francis about how he prays.

[Francis] responds, “I pray the breviary every morning. I like to pray with the Psalms. Then, later, I celebrate Mass. I sometimes pray the Rosary. What I really prefer is adoration in the evening, even when I get distracted and think of other things, or even fall asleep praying. In the evening then, between seven and eight o’clock, I stay in front of the Blessed Sacrament for an hour in adoration. But I pray silently even when I am waiting at the dentist or at other times of the day.”…

Francis is then pressed on the question of what should be the focus of the church. He replies,

“We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods… We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant.”

A few days ago, Francis further enacted this new Papal approach when he sanctioned Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, the so-called “Bishop of Bling”, for spending the equivalent of $43 million on remodeling for his clerical residence. Francis has reclaimed the opulent palace. A section of it is in the process of conversion; the plans are for it to be turned into a soup kitchen for Limburg’s homeless.

Reviving the church by returning to the teachings of Jesus. What a concept.

I don’t wish any ill on any fellow primate or mammal of mine, so I don’t at all look forward to the death of Joseph Ratzinger, I don’t, or any other pope, not really, except for one tiny reason which I ought to confess and share with you. When he dies, there’s quite a long interval ’til the conclave can meet, and for that whole time, that whole interval — it is a delicious, lucid interlude — there isn’t anyone on Earth who claims to be infallible.

Isn’t that nice?

All I think, all I want to propose in closing is this: that if the human species is to rise to the full height that’s demanded by its dignity, and by its intelligence, we must all of us move to a state of affairs, where that condition is permanent. And I think we should get on with it.

____

It’s the strange thing about the Catholic church, it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say we with our permissive society, we are obsessed. No, we have a healthy attitude — we like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly, because it’s a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult. It’s a bit like food in that respect, only even more exciting. And the only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that, in erotic terms, is the Catholic Church in a nutshell.

Do you know who would be the last person ever to be accepted as a prince of the Church? The Galileean carpenter. That Jew. They would kick him out before he tried to cross the threshold. He would be so ill-at-ease in the Church. What would he think! What would he think of St. Peter’s? What would he think of the wealth, and the power, and the self-justification, and the wheedling apologies?

__________

From Christopher Hitchens’s and Stephen Fry’s opening statements in their debate on the motion Is the Catholic Church a Force for Good in the World?. If you’re a Catholic, I wouldn’t recommend watching the debate — it’s one of the most decisively one-sided contests I’ve ever seen.

“But there was always more to this phenomenon that should have compelled my attention. Consider the ludicrous ideology that made it possible: The Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behaviors taboo. Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception, preferring, instead, that the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives. As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy — or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty, and death by AIDS. Add to this inhumanity the artifice of cloistered celibacy, and you now have an institution — one of the wealthiest on earth — that preferentially attracts pederasts, pedophiles, and sexual sadists into its ranks, promotes them to positions of authority, and grants them privileged access to children. Finally, consider that vast numbers of children will be born out of wedlock, and their unwed mothers vilified, wherever Church teaching holds sway — leading boys and girls by the thousands to be abandoned to Church-run orphanages only to be raped and terrorized by the clergy. Here, in this ghoulish machinery set to whirling through the ages by the opposing winds of shame and sadism, we mortals can finally glimpse how strangely perfect are the ways of the Lord.

In 2009, The Irish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA) investigated such of these events as occurred on Irish soil. Their report runs to 2,600 pages. Having read only an oppressive fraction of this document, I can say that when thinking about the ecclesiastical abuse of children, it is best not to imagine shades of ancient Athens and the blandishments of a “love that dare not speak its name.” Yes, there have surely been polite pederasts in the priesthood, expressing anguished affection for boys who would turn 18 the next morning. But behind these indiscretions there is a continuum of abuse that terminates in utter evil. The scandal in the Catholic Church — one might now safely say the scandal that is the Catholic Church — includes the systematic rape and torture of orphaned and disabled children…

The evidence suggests that the misery of these children was facilitated and concealed by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church at every level, up to and including the prefrontal cortex of the current Pope. In his former capacity as Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict personally oversaw the Vatican’s response to reports of sexual abuse in the Church. What did this wise and compassionate man do upon learning that his employees were raping children by the thousands? Did he immediately alert the police and ensure that the victims would be protected from further torments? One still dares to imagine such an effulgence of basic human sanity might have been possible, even within the Church. On the contrary, repeated and increasingly desperate complaints of abuse were set aside, witnesses were pressured into silence, bishops were praised for their defiance of secular authority, and offending priests were relocated only to destroy fresh lives in unsuspecting parishes. It is no exaggeration to say that for decades (if not centuries) the Vatican has met the formal definition of a criminal organization, devoted not to gambling, prostitution, drugs, or any other venial sin, but to the sexual enslavement of children.”

Only last week did Pope Benedict XVI travel to Sydney, Australia to “apologize” for the 620 now confirmed cases of Catholic child abuse in the city of Victoria, Australia alone. This marks the sixth continent upon which Catholic priests, in the thousands, have been charged with abusing and torturing children left to the care of the clergy.

There could be nothing more contemptible than this. To say the very least: The pope is not infallible and his church is not inscrutable. Period.